Reply to Spin-off "The student as a paying customer"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think most people are missing the biggest disconnect in understanding how universities function.

Parents and students feel that they have a paying customer relationship with professors. Hence the attitude that “My tuition money pays your salary” They view teaching as the professors primary responsibility.

For most professors teaching is not the most important part of their job description - research is. Publishing and research is how professors keep their department rank - and this is what determines the university’s rank in their field. Faculty Raises, promotions and tenure are primarily a function of research quality. Teaching has very little impact on salary and promotion. There are countless tenured profs with terrible teaching evaluation. Professors with excellent teaching evaluations and terrible research get fired.

As long as parents want their kid to go to the “highest ranked” colleges without understanding what this means, there will continue to be this disconnect. [/quote]

Bingo[/quote]

This 100%. I'd add that professors are not trained to teach - 90% of our training in grad school is focused on research. We may get some teaching experience in grad school as a TA, but at a research-focused university, teaching ability is a distant second priority in hiring to research ability. Many profs (myself included) put a lot of time and effort into being good teachers, but we are not rewarded for it and if anything, it comes as a cost to our research programs.

I'd add - every year I see more and more expected of the professors in the classroom, and less and less expected of the students. Why is this? Why shouldn't students be expected to take responsibility for their education?

Finally, frankly, many college students have no business being college students. They do not know why they are there, and it's a waste of everyone's time and effort. We need to bring back vocational programs in a serious way. [/quote]

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